The Hood Museum of Art is delighted to be a venue for the traveling exhibition Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth, February 8–June 22, 2024. Including the work of 17 artists in a wide range of media, the exhibition explores the use and significance of gold in artistic expression today. The exhibition was organized by Dr. Emily Stamey, Elizabeth McIver Weatherspoon Curator of Academic Programming and Head of Exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro. It features the work of Radcliffe Bailey, Larissa Bates, william cordova, Angela Fraleigh, Gajin Fujita, Nicholas Galanin, Liz Glynn, Shan Goshorn, Sherin Guirguis, Titus Kaphar, Hung Liu, James Nares, Ronny Quevedo, Shinji Turner-Yamamoto, Danh Vo, Stacy Lynn Waddell, and Summer Wheat.

Across time and cultures, gold has served as a metaphor for what we value most. Symbolically, it stands in for goodness, excellence, brilliance, and wealth. Craftspeople have long pounded gold into thin sheets called leaves, which are applied in a process called gilding. In realms of the spiritual, this gilding illuminates sacred texts, gives otherworldly luster to holy spaces, and allows religious sculptures to shine.

While we most frequently associate gold leaf with historical traditions, the material appears frequently in the work of contemporary artists as well. Those represented in this exhibition turn to gilding as a means of reconsidering our value systems. Gilding images of graffiti and sidewalks, cardboard boxes, and architectural fragments, they ask us to see the beauty in what we overlook and honor that which we throw away. Through gilding images of people—often those who have been disempowered or forgotten—they ask us to bolster our collective humanity. If, as the saying goes, “all that glitters is not gold,” then the artists represented here offer an inverse proposition: perhaps that which does not always shine is most worthy of our attention.

Ashley Offill, the Hood Museum’s curator of collections, says, “Gilded at the Hood Museum will feature well-known contemporary artists such as Titus Kaphur and Radcliffe Bailey as well as up-and-coming voices including Larissa Bates and Liz Glynn. The artworks included in the exhibition are rich not only in their materiality but also in the avenues they open up for discussions of history, identity, and societal value. These questions are foundational interrogations of the past and society’s assumptions about value.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue published by the Weatherspoon Art Museum, including contributions by art historian Rebecca Zorach and poet Joshua Bennett. This publication is shared electronically on the museum’s website for free to all interested readers (link). As curator Emily Stamey notes, “It seemed only fitting that, for an exhibition featuring artworks that raise critical questions about who and what we value, we would affirm the value of inclusion through free access to the information and knowledge created in this project.”